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The #metoo moment is important, but don’t forget the last one

Over the weekend, I was fixated on the rate of disclosures and consequences stemming from what now appears to be an entrenched pattern of predatory behaviour among Canada’s male politicians.

The news cycle has been unusual for the intensity and spectacle of unravelling careers and cross-party solidarity among women politicians. All appear to have agreed on calling the women stepping forward with their experiences “brave” and “courageous” and seem unified in calling for a clean-up of the boys club they have always known politics to be.

Demonstrators listen to speakers at the Toronto Women's March rally at Nathan Phillips Square on Jan. 20. "For 30 years we have been trying to get the world to pay attention to the nauseating variety and dizzying commonality to how women’s lives are impacted by violence," writes Amanda Dale. (Andrew Francis Wallace / Toronto Star)

Women in all parties, in the entertainment industry, and at just about every water cooler, are talking about the climate of intimidation, fear and reprisal that surrounds their experience of their male colleagues. The outpouring paints a picture of women hobbled in their careers, in their personal lives and in the public spaces they are told they are technically free to move through, now that feminism has succeeded in legislating equality.

This state of affairs may be shocking, but it is hardly surprising. I have lost count of the number of ways and the variety of places in which I have been asked if this is a #metoo watershed.

“Have we ever seen anything like this?” I’ve been asked. And more recently, “are we losing due process?”

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I have the longer view.

The #metoo moment is certainly important. It is a consciousness-raising fuelled in its reach and breadth by social media. It is a generation of women who feel they were sold a bill of goods when they were told they were equal. They are asking us: “How can this be true when our lives are curtailed by sexual violence?”

On April 11, 1980, Barbra Teena Schlifer was sexually assaulted and murdered in the basement stairwell of her Beaches apartment the night she celebrated her call to the Bar of Ontario as a promising young lawyer.

In the aftermath, Toronto Star columnist, Michele Landsberg wrote, “U.S. feminists have been writing for a decade about the fear of attack which hobbles women with invisible constraints. … Now Barbra Schlifer has been murdered … after a relentless year of well-reported attacks on women. … The trial of the rapists … was one long assault on the sexual history of the teenage girls.”

We have a folder of such articles at the clinic set up in her name that I work at. But Landsberg’s stands out: the article initiated a battle cry, and a turning point, a floodgate of consciousness-raising about the ubiquity of violence in ordinary women’s lives. Some believe it was a linchpin in launching the Canadian women’s movement. Sound familiar?

In our first year of operation, the Barbra Schlifer Clinic saw 160 women whose experience of violence caused them to seek the combined services of our lawyers and counsellors.

In our 2017 fiscal year (which ended March 31), we saw 4,700 women. For the first three quarters of this fiscal year, our numbers have topped 6,000 and we easily expect to exceed 7,000.

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In the area of sexual assault counselling alone, we have experienced an 83 per cent increase in requests over the last year. Taken over two years, we have 125 per cent increase in requests for sexual assault counselling. And, since those early days, we are now able to interpret in 200 languages so that women’s experiences of violence are accurately understood.

For 30 years we have been trying to get the world to pay attention to the nauseating variety and dizzying commonality to how women’s lives are impacted by violence. We are certainly not alone in this.

Globally, the United Nations has classified gender-based violence as a pandemic. Canada has felt itself to be a haven to those who experience violence elsewhere and has been less interested in seeing its own tolerance and complicity.

In 2016, the chief public health officer of Canada called violence in the family the single most significant determinant of health outcomes. And yet, we are trying to stem the tide of a pandemic with less than 1 per cent of the funding we give to health care. I often “joke” that we are trying to save lives lost to this pandemic by holding bake sales.

We have known and then unknown this moment routinely during my 30-year career working to end violence against women.

Last time we got some services, some legal changes and felt we had done the job.

This time, let’s not forget the last time. Let’s build on the moment of shock and dismay to create an adequately funded national strategy that uses this moment of holding politicians — who have a vested interest in keeping this moment brief and superficial, lest they lose some entrenched privilege — and leave a changed future for the women and men who follow.

Amanda Dale is the executive director of the Barbra Schlifer Commemorative Clinic.

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